


if the surface begs you home

by waveridden



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Hades Tigers (Blaseball Team), IRM of players who have been dead since season 2, Season/Series 07, and a Lot of feelings about stars, maincord-prohibited swearing, null team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 11:35:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29575464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waveridden/pseuds/waveridden
Summary: There are no stars in the Trench. Frasier knows this as soon as they arrive.
Relationships: Kiki Familia & Frasier Shmurmgle, Yazmin Mason & Frasier Shmurmgle
Comments: 22
Kudos: 25





	if the surface begs you home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [QueenEevee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenEevee/gifts).



> Some IRM notes: Frasier (they/them) is a frog and can’t speak. Jessi Wise (it/its) is a surfer/sailor/swimmer/all-around water athlete. Jenna Maldonado (she/her) is an astrophysicist.
> 
> For Cola, who said "I have a lot of feelings about this little frog who loves stars," and promptly made sure that I ALSO had a lot of feelings. Title is from [Bottom of the Sea](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ywpXFCFjfU) by Matt Nathanson. There is a tiny bit of cursing in this fic but otherwise no major CWs!

There are stars in Hades.

They’re hidden, of course, but Frasier has learned to see them anyways. They exist when they’re unseen, in day and in night. They exist in the depths of the sky, past the bloody turmoil of clouds above.

Frasier can orient themselves in Hades. They can find north and search for a glimmer of starlight. The stars in Hades are the same as the stars anywhere, and even if it feels different, they know the stars are out there. It’s a constant, something to have faith in.

The Trench is not Hades. The Trench is depth and water and pressure. The Trench is a cage, marble and glass. The Trench is impossible.

There are no stars in the Trench. Frasier knows this as soon as they arrive.

  
  


#

  
  


Yazmin throws herself first at Moody, then Scorpler, and at last Landry Violence. She has other friends here, too, players from other teams, people she greets tearfully and joyfully. She is welcomed here as a comrade, one more lost soul.

Frasier does not have friends from other teams. Frasier played a total of thirty-nine games.

Kiki finds them, looking unbearably sad. “I heard,” she signs, and Frasier bobs their head up and down. Her mouth twists. “Sorry.”

They started in the same game, Frasier and Kiki. The children of Ruby Tuesday. Frasier had been so excited to get to know her. But she only got five innings to her name before getting incinerated. It should be devastating, but Kiki looks relatively at ease here, more relaxed than she did while playing blaseball.

“I have some people I can introduce you to,” she signs. “Kind of like a club. We were going to meet anyways, do you want to come?”

Frasier nods again, a little more emphatically this time. There’s a loneliness to this place that they need to get past. No stars. No teammates, other than Yazmin. A club sounds like a great place to start.

Kiki leads them through the halls. They’re massive and shifting, but she doesn’t falter at all, leading them through the maze with ease. She stops at a door seemingly without random and throws it open. It’s clearly a bedroom, and the whole thing is covered wall to wall and floor to ceiling with maps.

“Oh,” says a woman Frasier sort of recognizes. “Another one?”

“This is Frasier.” Kiki spells out their name nice and slow, then adds, “Thirty-nine.”

The woman hisses through her teeth. She looks at Frasier. “Do you talk?”

Frasier shakes their head. She looks a little disappointed. “Well, welcome anyways. I’m Tiana, and that—” she points at a robot, bent low over a couple maps spread out on a desk “—is Atlas. Welcome to the club for poor bastards who played less than a season. We really just hang out because it’s more fun moping together than alone.”

Atlas looks up, a little belatedly, and waves. Frasier waves back, and Atlas beeps before going back to their maps.

“Don’t mind them.” Kiki rolls her eyes. “We meet here because Atlas is always looking at maps. We can’t drag them away.”

Atlas beeps, this time with a light flashing, presumably so Kiki can tell they’re beeping. Frasier’s not sure what it means, but Kiki laughs at it. “They’re obsessed.”

Frasier takes a minute to look around the room. Most of the maps are cities with blaseball teams: Charleston, Miami, San Francisco. There are railroad maps, and road maps. None of Hades, though, and Frasier feels oddly alone.

“What team were you on?” Tiana asks. Frasier immediately pantomimes tiger claws, and Tiana laughs, surprised. “That was pretty good! Tigers?”

Frasier nods. Kiki beams at them. “Tiana holds our record,” she explains. “Forty-four games played. And Frasier started the same game as me.”

Tiana winces. “Ruby Tuesday?”

Frasier nods again morosely. Tiana shakes her head. “Fuckin’ blaseball,” she mutters. Frasier blinks, surprised, and she seems to notice. “I know you’re new here, but— look, blaseball wasn’t good for any of us. It wasn’t good for the Tigers or the Talkers, or me, or you. You’re allowed to be angry about that.”

There hasn’t even been a sliver of an instant where Frasier has been angry. Sad and scared, but they were never mad about playing blaseball. They’re not even sure how to react, faced with Tiana’s anger and surety.

So instead they wander over towards Atlas, climbing up to the desk. Atlas looks up and beeps once. Frasier thinks they understand the question: _what are you looking for?_

After a long second, Frasier reaches down and traces a symbol on one of the maps: a five-pointed star. Atlas is quiet for a long minute, then they beep a little more hesitantly. Frasier’s not entirely sure what it means, but they stay on Atlas’s desk anyways, even as Kiki and Tiana get caught up in some kind of gossip that they don’t understand.

It takes a couple days, or whatever the closest approximation is of a couple days in the Trench. But eventually Atlas brings them a couple of star charts. They look old, a little faded, but intact. There’s a note that says two names on top in neat, blocky print: JENNA. JESSI.

Frasier thanks Atlas half a dozen times. Atlas beeps back excitedly. Frasier is fairly certain they’re friends now.

  
  


#

  
  


Frasier’s first mission is figuring out which direction is north, a task that proves literally impossible in the maze of the Trench. If they take a wrong turn they end up at someone’s bedroom, or the hall of statues.

They ask Kiki for help, but even she gets lost; they ask Atlas for help, but they get distracted trying to map out something else. They even ask Yazmin, and she promises that she’ll help soon, in a couple days. So Frasier spends most of their time by themself.

It’s on one of these trips, wandering through the hall, that they discover two things at once. The first is a wall of glass, stretching up to a ceiling too high for Frasier to see. Outside is water, murky and constantly moving, light flickering through the window and bouncing all around the room. It’s the scariest thing Frasier has ever seen.

The second thing they discover is a person sitting at the base of the wall. It turns when Frasier approaches and waves. “You new?”

Frasier nods, and the person motions them over. It’s human but short, short enough that Frasier can tell even when it’s sitting down. Half of its hair is in a ponytail, and the other is hanging loose in its face. It pats a spot on the floor, and Frasier sits down.

“You like water?” it asks. Frasier shakes their head, and it looks surprised. “Really? Little froggy dude like you?”

Frasier shrugs. They’ve never gone swimming before, and they’re not about to start now.

It looks out the window. “I used to live on an island,” it says, sounding far away. “I used to surf and sail and swim every single day. I was good at it, too. Sailed all the way from Tonga to Hawai’i with nothing but a boat and the stars to guide me.”

Frasier’s eyes widen at the mention of stars. They scramble for the map and unfold it. Atlas’s note is still there, and they tap at both of the names.

“Huh,” it says, and reaches out to run a finger along the edge of the map. “Someone sent you to find me?”

Frasier looks at it expectantly. After a second it smiles and holds out a hand, gently, massive compared to Frasier’s tiny webbed fingers. “I’m Jessi,” it says. “I used to play for the Fridays. You trying to find the stars?”

Frasier nods as Jessi shakes their hand. It smiles. “I can help. But there are two rules. You gotta listen to my stories about home, and we don’t tell Jenna about it.”

Frasier hasn’t tried very hard to find either Jenna or Jessi. It’s disappointing, knowing that they can’t work with both of them, but they suppose that one of them will be better than neither. So they nod.

Jessi’s grin widens. “You and me are gonna be great friends,” it promises. “We’re going to find the stars again.”

  
  


#

  
  


The star mission is waylaid, almost immediately, by Yazmin.

“I know you never met the rest of the stripes,” she says. She and Frasier hadn’t talked much on the Tigers, but she had always been kind to them, and her eyes are kind now. “But they want to meet you. You’re one of us.”

This is somehow more intimidating than trying to divine a sky based on nothing but the reflections of water. They know the legend of Landry Violence, and they watched Moody and Scorpler get incinerated. But these were Yazmin’s teammates. People she played with for years. Frasier hasn’t spoken to any of them.

They agree anyways. There’s not terribly much else to do in the Trench.

This is how Frasier finds themself in the strangest batting practice of their life. Yazmin pitches, which means that Frasier is left in the makeshift dugout with the rest of the Tigers.

“How have you been settling in?” Scorpler asks, between at-bats. “It’s not so bad, once you get used to it. Not like being alive, but better than being dead.”

“Scorpler,” Landry sighs. “Don’t try to scare them.”

Frasier shakes their head. Not scared.

Scorpler points. “See? It’s fine, they’re a stripe. You been getting used to things, Shmurmgle?”

They have to think about it for a second. Most of their time is spent searching for stars, which isn’t a mission they ever thought they’d have. But it’s a way to pass the time, which is more than most people in the Trench seem to have.

“Yaz says you’re looking for stars,” Moody says, which startles Frasier out of their thoughts. Both Landry and Scorpler turn to them, and Frasier has to try not to shrink away. “How’s it going?”

Frasier winces. Moody nods in understanding. “Keep looking,” they say. Frasier thinks it’s supposed to be encouraging, but it just feels ominous. “You can figure it out one day.”

“Hey,” Yazmin yells from the mound. “You guys gonna play ball, or are you just gonna chitchat?”

“You gonna throw the ball?” Landry calls back. Yazmin lobs it at his ankle, and he steps out of the way, laughing. Frasier is heartrendingly jealous for a second, but it passes. It always does.

  
  


#

  
  


Jessi’s approach to finding the stars is nothing like Frasier’s. They had been concerned with going out and searching, mapping out as much of the world as possible, but Jessi is the opposite. It prefers to stay by the glass wall, where it can see the water. Instead of searching for stars in the space, it’s searching the space for the stars, trying to pinpoint exactly what light is visible through the shifting waters.

There are days when Frasier likes staying with Jessi. True to its word, it tells a lot of stories about Tonga and Hawai’i, about sailing and surfing. A lot of blaseball players seem to have been something else first, but Jessi is an athlete, through and through, and there’s something admirable to that.

But there are some days where Frasier needs to explore, to move through the hall. So they wander the halls by themself. Scorpler comes with them sometimes; Frasier’s not sure if it’s a misplaced sense of obligation because Frasier replaced them, or if they actually care about the stars.

Still, Frasier prefers to be alone. They like the maze of the halls. They’re starting to figure out certain patterns, rooms that are always clumped together, communal spaces that the halls always organize themselves around. This place changes, but they’re learning the changes.

They’re going through the halls one day, face buried in a star map, when they bump into someone’s leg, hard. They look up and frantically sign “Sorry,” trying to look as remorseful as possible.

“You alright?” the woman asks. She asks it not out of concern, but almost because it seems like she’s obligated. She’s tall, dark-skinned and pretty. Most people in the Trench wear either jerseys or casual clothes, but she’s dressed nicely, something that wouldn’t be out of place at a cocktail party.

Then her eyes slide over to the map, and she immediately kneels down. “Are these stars?”

Frasier nods excitedly. This is the first time someone has seemed interested in it.

Her fingers move along the map confidently. “We’re towards the edges,” she murmurs, and traces a square around the edges of the map. “I know that much. Have you checked the statue hall yet?”

Frasier shakes their head. She nods decisively. “Let’s start there. Have you been doing this by yourself?”

Another head shake. The woman frowns. “Can I meet who you’ve been working with?”

So Frasier leads her back to the glass room, the water in front of them. Together they walk inside, but the woman stops short. “Oh, no.”

Jessi turns around and frowns. “Frasier, what was rule number two?”

Rule number two was no Jenna. They turn to see Jenna, scowling right back at Jessi. “You told them they couldn’t talk to me?”

“It was for my sake,” Jessi says coolly. “But by all means, Maldonado, be a scientist about it. That worked before.”

“I was an astrophysicist,” Jenna bites out. “I know a thing or two about stars.”

“Oh, and I don’t, because I’m not trained?”

“You know the stars for sailing, which is only useful in certain situations.”

Jessi snorts. “Yeah, because having a fucking doctorate is useful in every situation.”

“It’s more useful than sitting here and doing nothing and calling it helpful.”

This has the cadence of an argument that they’ve had before. Frasier had been assuming that they were the first to look for the stars, but maybe they were just the first with a map. Some people have been here for years.

Jenna and Jessi are still arguing now, getting louder as they go. Neither of them notice Frasier slipping out, map in hand.

  
  


#

  
  


“Why stars?” Yaz asks.

Frasier hasn’t visited Jessi since the fight with Jenna, and they haven’t run into Jenna again. They’d mentioned it to Yazmin, though, and she’d offered to explore with them on the spot. It’s the first time she’s joining them, and if Frasier’s being honest, today’s less about the stars and more about spending time with her. They’re wandering together through halls that Frasier already knows, mostly for Yazmin’s sake.

“I mean, I know you did astrology,” she continues. She’s holding the map, and they’re sitting on her shoulder. It’s faster than trying to keep pace together. “Or astronomy. One of those. You did that in Hades, it was fun.”

Frasier nods. Yazmin smiles for a second. “Is it some kind of secret backstory we never unlocked?” They shake their head, and she hums, considering. “Hobby? Witchcraft? Divination? Am I getting warmer?”

Frasier wishes that they could have a pen, or something to type with. There’s no way to pantomime what the stars make them feel. They’re small, but the stars make them feel _small,_ italicized and bolded and in screaming neon yellow. The stars make them feel small and yet so important. The universe created stars, unreachable and brilliant; the universe created constellations, binding itself together with art; the universe created Frasier Shmurmgle.

There are no stars in the Trench. It’s the loneliest thing in the world.

Yazmin stops asking after a moment, but she keeps up a steady patter of conversation as she walks through the Trench. She discovers rooms that Frasier has found a dozen times over already, but they cheer along with her as though it’s a brand new discovery. Sitting on her shoulder, at a higher angle, it even feels brand new.

  
  


#

  
  


The short-term club is meeting again, Frasier’s pretty sure. They don’t actually meet all that often, which is fine. Frasier’s busy, lately, trying to synthesize all the star maps together. It’s harder now that it’s just them, but that’s fine. It’s still something to do, other than pickup games of blaseball with everyone else in the Trench.

They go to Atlas’s room and knock, less out of courtesy and more because they’re still working on opening doors. Everything feels quiet, abruptly, and Frasier is left wondering if they should’ve listened to the noise.

After a second Kiki opens the door, smiling. Frasier waves, and she waves back. “We have a surprise for you!”

She opens the door a little wider, and Frasier sees Jessi and Jenna, both looking sullen. Yazmin is standing between them, looking tired, but she perks up when she sees Frasier. “Okay,” she says, determined. “I realized the other day that you have a lot of people helping you with the stars, but we hadn’t been talking to each other. So I decided to ask Kiki, and she mentioned that you’d gotten help from some other players.”

“I was helping,” Jessi says pointedly, but Yazmin clears her throat, and it immediately looks sheepish. “I mean. I was trying to help from my spot by the water, but I can help by looking around too.”

“And I’ve been talking to Atlas about the maps,” Jenna adds. Atlas punctuates this with a beep, and Jenna smiles triumphantly. “So if Wise actually puts in some effort—”

“And if Maldonado stops acting like going to college makes her queen of the world—”

“I am going to lock you in separate supply closets,” Yazmin says peacefully, and Jessi and Jenna both stop short. “We’re helping Frasier. The rest of the stripes are going to meet us in the statue hall, and we’re going to divide and conquer.”

Frasier wants to ask why. Frasier wants to say Jenna and Jessi don’t have to go to this much trouble. They want to say it’s only stars, it’s only them, it was supposed to be their adventure.

But Kiki catches their eye and smiles, gently. “We’ll figure it out,” she promises, and it feels like looking at the stars again: Frasier has never felt smaller, or more important. “Some things are worth a team effort.”

“She’s right,” Jenna says. Frasier looks at her, surprised; they’ve only met her the once, and it didn’t go well. But she looks determined. “I want to see the stars again. So do you, and so does Wise. So we’re going to figure it out. Deal?”

“Deal?” Jessi echoes, looking hopeful.

It’s looking at Frasier — everyone’s looking at Frasier. And they can’t look at everyone at once, so they fix their eyes on Yazmin and nod once, decisively. So it’s her answering smile that they get to see first, and they’re suddenly sure of themself. The stars are here, somewhere. It’s just a matter of time until they figure it out.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm @waveridden on Tumblr and Twitter, come say hi!


End file.
